This edited collection offers an exploration of American literature in the age of Trumpism―understood as an ongoing sociopolitical and affective reality―by bringing together analyses of some of the ways in which American writers have responded to the derealization of political culture in the United States and the experience of a ‘new’ American reality after 2016. The volume’s premise is that the disruptions and dislocations that were so exacerbated by the political ascendancy of Trump and his spectacle-laden presidency have unsettled core assumptions about American reality and the possibilities of representation. The blurring of the relationship between fact and fiction, bolstered by the discourses of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’ has not only drawn attention to the shattering of any notion of ‘shared’ reality, but has also forced a reexamination of the purpose and value of literature, especially when considering its troubled relation to the representation of ‘America.’ The authors in this collection respond to the invitation to reassess the workings of fiction and critique in an age of Trumpism by considering some of the most recent literary responses to the (new) American realit(ies)―including works by Colson Whitehead, Ben Winters, Claudia Rankine, Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, and Steve Erickson, to name but a few―, some of which were composed in the run-up to the 2016 election but were able to accurately and incisively imagine the world to come.
Author(s): Dolores Resano
Series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 291
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: On the Meanings of ‘American Reality’
A Corpus of Trump Fiction?
Against Literary Nationalism
Aims and Organization of the Volume
References
Part I: Getting Across in a Trumpian World
Chapter 2: “The office could be any office”: Toward a New Sincerity in the Age of Trumpism
Nixon and the Useful Tools of Postmodernism
Untruth or Post-truth: The Unavailability of a Trump-Watergate
David Foster Wallace and Image Culture
Between New Sincerity and the New/Alt-right
From Jefferson to Reagan and Trump: America’s Private Language
Aestheticization, Irony, and Privacy
Learning from Wallace’s The Pale King
Truth-Values: The Pale King, Trump and the Neoliberal Marketplace of Ideas
Digitization and the Alt-right
Establishing Moral Responsibility and Truth After the Death of the Author
“The Office Could Be Any Office”: Trump in the (Oval) Office
References
Chapter 3: “I’d get so constipated if I were you”: Ottessa Moshfegh’s Intimate Disgust
“Just as I’d Always Hoped It Would Be”: Disgust in Moshfegh’s Fiction
“Don’t say It, It’s Disgusting, Let’s Not Talk”: Disgust in the Trump Era
“Everything Is Political”: Affect and the Novel
“‘Is He Worth The Stink?’”: Disgust, Contamination, and Artistic Value in My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Coda: Death in Her Hands
References
Chapter 4: Writing the Resistance: Claudia Rankine’s Exploration of Whiteness in The White Card
On Whiteness
On Blackness
On Naming
References
Part II: Alternative Histories of ‘America’
Chapter 5: Alternative Facts, Alternative Genres: Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach
The Turn to Genre
Manhattan Beach and the Performance of Genre
Authority and Authenticity
Reading Genre, Reading Genre Fiction
References
Chapter 6: The Day the Music Died: The Invisible Republic in Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn
The Dream Life of the Nation
American Weimar
Shadowbahn
The Invisible Republic
Saving America From Itself
References
Chapter 7: “The direction of the bizarre”: Reimagining History in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
References
Chapter 8: Underground Airlines, Chaos, and Dehumanization
Literalizing a Metaphor
Writing About the Black Abject
An Alternate World
Dehumanization and Violence
Chaos and History
Conclusion
References
Part III: Humor as Contestation
Chapter 9: How Do We Laugh about This? Literary Satire in Trump Times
Bad for America, Good for the Novel?
It’s Difficult Not to Write Satire
References
Chapter 10: American Dirt’s Trumpian Discourse and the Latinx Parodic Response
Trump vs. the Latinx Community: A Discourse Analysis
American Dirt and the Idealization of the ‘Good’ Latinx Migrant
Writing My Latino Novel: Mocking the Stereotype Through Twitterature
References
Chapter 11: Writing as Antidote: Muslim Writers Resist in Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic and Banthology
“Stories from Unwanted Nations”
“Words and Pictures on How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Alien Next Door”
Testimonies of a Political Moment
Humor and the Speculative in Najwa Binshatwan’s “Return Ticket”
Humor, Vulnerability, and the Luxury of Astonishment in Karl Sharro’s “The Joys of Applying for a US Visa”
Concluding Thoughts
References
Chapter 12: Coda: Empathy in the Age of Trump: Or, Using Our Weird Cultural Moment to Reassess How Fiction Works
References
Index
